Islamic Reform: Holy Grail or Poisoned Chalice (Part II)
by Mary Jackson (May 2009)
Jihad Watch in January 2009, which links to a piece by John Stringer in St Francis Magazine:
Jamal al-Banna, a younger brother of Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) has just published a book in which he argues that 653 of the Hadiths as written in al-Bukhari and Muslim are incorrect and should not be accepted. The Arabic book is titled The Cleansing of Bukhari and Muslim from useless Hadiths (2008).
After the Qur’an, al-Bukhari’s collection of Hadiths (the acts and sayings of the prophet Muhammad) is considered the most sacred book in Islam
But Mr Jamal al-Banna (86 years old now) is used to being attacked by al-Azhar, and he says he does not care. He excludes six kinds of Hadiths:
·Those that explain the Qur’an: the Qur’an can’t by explained by Hadiths.
·Those that talk bad about women – like the one’s that call them equal to dogs and cows and to beat them up and so on.
·Those that forbid the freedom of religion and that threaten those who leave Islam.
·Those with extreme ideas for encouraging people into Islam and the ones threatening people wit physical violence.
· Those that talk about Muhammad’s miracles.
· Some others of which he thinks that the story is not true at all.
Considering who his older brother was and where he lives (Egypt), Mr al-Banna is exceptionally brave. But is he right? An interview three years ago in Egypt Today gives examples of the form his questioning takes:
Muslim jurists regard the Sunnah as the second source of Shariah (Islamic law) after the Qur’an a fact that has led El-Banna to declare that the criteria scholars have set to verify the authenticity of reported prophetic traditions as insufficient.
[…]
He […] questions the authenticity of the Hadith that obliges women to cover all parts of their body except their hands and faces. The Hadith is believed to have been reported by Aisha, but El-Banna claims that one of the narrators of the Hadith was not a contemporary of the Prophet (PBUH)’s wife, so his report cannot be taken as authentic.
A would-be reformer must surely be tempted. If only all the “bad” Hadith turned out to be inauthentic, we might be half way to reconciling Islam and Western enlightenment values. Certainly it is encouraging to see a Muslim looking critically at texts that have been held for so long to be above scrutiny. Yet doubts remain, and they are twofold.
First, what constitutes a “bad” Hadith? For Mr al-Banna, it seems to be a Hadith that does not accord with advanced Western thinking, for example one that equates women with dogs and cows. But how objective is Mr al-Banna, when he sets out to prove that such Hadith are inauthentic? Could his good intentions – and his enlightened Western values – influence his conclusions, or at least his selection of evidence? I have no answer to this, but I have a question: what if some of the “good” Hadith turn out to be inauthentic and the “bad” ones come straight from the Prophet’s mouth? Will the scholarship remain neutral when it tells us what we do not want to hear?
Secondly, Mr al-Banna does not challenge the Koran, only the Hadith. The Koran, for him, is the sacred, unchanging, perfect word of God, binding for all times. From the article:
The Qur’an was revealed in God’s own words without modification to serve as the main constituent [of faith] for the human race in different times and places.
This is a stumbling block. If we accept Mr al-Banna’s arguments, we can dismiss the commandment on women to cover all parts of the body except the hands and face as a weak or inauthentic Hadith. Good news for Muslim women, but now for the bad news: Koran 4:34 enjoins beating of “disobedient” wives, and cannot be dismissed. I would not rate the chances of an Egyptian woman who defies her husband and goes bare-headed. “Inauthentic Hadith” is a poor argument against a divinely sanctioned beating, even one that does not break her bones.
If Mr al-Banna succeeds in taming the Hadith – and it is by no means certain that he will, or that his views will find favour – the Koran remains savage, and a rather ignoble savage at that. There are some injunctions to behave kindly, mainly to other Muslims, but what do you do with the “sword verse” (“slay the unbelievers wherever you find them”), or the reward for so doing, namely a large but unspecified number of houris (beautiful virgins) for the slayer (Koran 55, 56-7)?
Montecarlo, to the work of Christoph Luxenberg, which, it is claimed and hoped, does just that:
“Christoph Luxenberg” is the pseudonymic [sic] author of a sensational but scholarly bookKoranBerlin2000.
Luxenberg’s book has had earth-shattering consequences in the IslamicIslamisticNewsweekarticleNo wonder, because Luxenberg finds, inter alia, that the famed “wide-eyed houris (= virginpost-mortem sexual rewardsuicide-bombergrapes?
[…]
The existence of the Koran is a historical fact. It is now a question of seeing this historical fact in its historical context, which also means seeing it historically and subjecting the text to critical examination from that point of view. But critically does not mean that I want to disparage the Koran. I only want to understand it correctly on the basis of historio-linguistic findings.
Journal of Syriac Studies. The praise, from Robert R. Phenix Jr and Cornelia B. Horn, is not unqualified:
– easier said than done.
So, if weak Hadith and white grapes will not reform Islam, what will? Part III will conclude my seemingly fruitless search.
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